Purdue University Quiz Bowl is pleased to announce our mirror of Delta Burke on March 2nd, 2019 on our West Lafayette, Indiana campus!

Eligibility:
This tournament is open to all college teams and the questions are regular-minus in difficulty (and always a fun set to play, thanks to the efforts of author Chris Borglum). High school teams are permitted to play with permission from the tournament director (me).

Location and Schedule:
The tournament will be held in the Delon and Elizabeth Hampton Hall of Civil Engineering. Parking nearby is available in a garage on Northwestern Ave. and a small lot adjacent to Wang Hall of Physics. Here's a link to a map of the parking areas: https://bit.ly/2D1x99k

The tournament will begin no later than 9:00 AM. Check in will begin at 8:15. Please arrive between 8:15 and 8:45 so we can start as close to 9:00 as possible.

Fees and Discounts:
Registration Fee: $100.00 per team
Buzzer System Discount: $5.00 per working system
Travel Discount: $10.00 if traveling more than 200 miles to Purdue one-way according to Google maps.
Staff Discount: $15.00 per moderator approved by tournament director

Payment can be made in cash or check the day of the tournament. Checks should be made to "Purdue University Quiz Bowl". Let us know if other arrangements are necessary.

To register please fill out the form at the link below. Only one registration is necessary per school (you may let us know about multiple teams within it): https://goo.gl/forms/dYyFDa2oLxx8nKLL2

Please register no later than noon on Wednesday, February 27th. Any questions may be e-mailed to me at stan-DOT-jastrzebski-AT-gmail-DOT-com or to purduequizbowl-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

Food:
Several restaurants are within walking distance on Northwestern Ave. Various restaurants are also available in the basement of the Purdue Memorial Union.

This is a soft field cap of 18 teams, with the possibility of expansion with interest.

They didn't advertise it to all college teams. They were very clear on the difficulty and just said it was open to all college teams, which it is and probably should be (maybe UG-only, I suppose). Almost every school that showed up is regional and is the kind of school/team I would expect would attend such an event. Almost, of course.

They didn't advertise it to all college teams. They were very clear on the difficulty and just said it was open to all college teams, which it is and probably should be (maybe UG-only, I suppose). Almost every school that showed up is regional and is the kind of school/team I would expect would attend such an event. Almost, of course.

That's fair! I don't want to put too much blame on the shoulders of Purdue when it's so very clear who's out of line here.

a) http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=21943 for the additional reason that if you don't, teams that do not belong at your novice-oriented tournament will attend it and put up >25 ppb against clubs that acted in good faith and sent actual less experienced players (Chicago, etc.)

b) If you're in Toronto J's position as a national top 25 team and are considering whether to engage in some QB tourism (in this case, involving what google maps says is a 8 1/2 hour drive to West Lafayette) to play a tournament traditionally oriented toward teams that are not as good as you are, please give some thought to the option that you could, instead, not.

Jakob Myers
MSU '21, Naperville North (IL) '17"No one has ever organized a greater effort to get people interested in pretending to play quiz bowl"
-Ankit Aggarwal
Member, PACE
Memerator

Aayush Rajasekaran has been playing collegiate quizbowl since 2011. Jay Misuk has been playing collegiate quizbowl since 2006, when a current college freshman would have been five years old. There's no adequate analogy to convey how pathetic it is that these people would travel any distance (let alone over 500 miles) to play a tournament for novice collegiate players.

Echoing what was said above, I was very excited for some of our newest players to get a chance to compete without the shadow of more experienced teammates. These are promising and motivated players, and it's very sad to see a group of true novices miss out on a tournament win to a team with a combined 20 years of college experience to their combined ~2.4.

Last edited by heterodyne on Sun Mar 03, 2019 4:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hey, all, I'm sorry. I don't have much more to say, except that I'm sorry in particular to any teams that had their experience yesterday ruined by our playing. I did feel like I was saying "we've been doing this a long time" in an apologetic tone to the novice teams a lot.

The only motivation we had in playing was to get to play one more tournament. This is my last year playing collegiate QB (at least for a while), so Jay and I decided to make a series of roadtrips to the States to play everything we could. This includes playing PIANO at the JHU site next weekend, where we expect to lose most games, so it's not like beating novices is the only way we get our ya-yas.

The only defence I have to offer is that I did check with John Petrovich whether it was okay for us to play, and I did offer to split into 2 solo teams if they thought that would be better. We decided not to do that because there would be other experienced teams, and because the field worked out better this way.

It seems like there's a lot of vitriol here, so I'm going to risk sounding like a bad guy to go out of my way to defend Toronto and Purdue here (if you're gonna potentially attack me too at least here what I have to say).

Should Toronto have split their team? Absolutely.

Should Toronto have not been allowed to play altogether? I'm not so sure. I do think they're quite an experienced set of players, but Delta Burke has always struck me as a tournament that players take less seriously than ACF Fall, and I think I speak for (almost) everyone who played in that we all had a ton of fun getting a chance to listen to questions with less cognititive strain than a regular difficulty tournament.

Should Purdue be to blamed? Absolutely not. I think Toronto made this a much more interesting tournament, and every team only had to play them once. The rounds went by fast, and I didn't hear anyone complain about having to face Toronto. Also, it's not like Chicago can't take pride in being the best UG / novice team there.

Granted I was tired playing this, so I'm not sure how accurate all of this is. If everyone seems so passionate about this -- consider being more proactive in the future in requesting a UG-restriction / novice-restriction. You can't really blame Purdue / Toronto for just wanting to put on / play a fun quiz bowl event.

Also worth mentioning that Chicago has sent teams in the past that have racked upPPB > 25. (Not asking Chicago to defend its past, but thought this was worth mentioning in terms of precedence.)

At Delta Burke 2019 @ Purdue:
2.14 average years played (player)
5.8 average years played (team)
17/28 players (60.2% of the field) had played <1 year in college
22/28 players (78.6%) had played <2 years in college
25/28 players (89.3%) were undergraduate

Both individual players on Toronto J have played more years of collegiate quiz bowl on their own than either of the two teams you are citing had in total. A team of novices coming to a tournament and performing well against other teams of novices is very, very different than what Toronto J did.

The teams at a tournament should not have to tell the tournament host that a set should be restricted to undergraduates or novices. While Purdue can be forgiven for not specifically limiting the set, it is still very inappropriate that a team so far out of the target audience of the event would do something like this.

I've gotten our fabulous admins to set up a private discussion forum for this set. I'm very interested in both constructive and destructive criticism of the questions and hope you'll join the forum and offer some of that. Go to your User Control Panel and request access, and I'll try to respond to those requests ASAP. Cheers!